


Field Guide 404

by tristram_again



Category: Pikmin (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, exploratory, new captains, new pikmin types, original captains based on existing nintendo characters a la olimar being analagous to mario, original captains based on the NATO phonetic alphabet a la alph brittany and charlie, speculative story for what i'd like to see in pikmin 4
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-01
Updated: 2020-11-17
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:00:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27342370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tristram_again/pseuds/tristram_again
Summary: Ten years after PNF-404’s colonization, a Hocotatian scientist travels into dangerous, beast-ridden territory in search of a rare candypop bud for parasitic pikmin.Instead, she discovers an eerie missing link—something half-pikmin, half-human.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8





	1. Part 1

Izzy woke at her desk, bolt upright, pen in hand scratching a line of ink through the sketch in front of her. At the corner of her desk, one of her white pikmin snoozed on a potted glowcap.

Exhaustion weighed down her bones. She had fallen asleep working. Her neck and back and elbows popped as she stretched forward, pressing backs of her hands into the wall. She didn’t have to stretch far—her tiny dorm barely fit her desk, bed, and mini-fridge.

Stomach growling, Izzy pushed back from her desk (jostling the small pikmin curled around the glowcap, who squeaked) and rolled her chair over to the mini-fridge. She peeked inside. Empty—besides a half-full can of electric-green energy drink, which she had rationed out to save for dinner. Her stomach snarled again, and her eye wandered to her empty coin purse, which lay open on her bed. Maybe she could convince one of her coworkers to share a fast-food meal…

She glanced at the clock. 3:46 A.M. Okay, maybe not.

Beside the coin purse sat her pikmin colony’s home—a small synthetic onion, sleek and round. About as large as a handheld lantern, the synthetic onion’s small size made it mobile, something it traded for a smaller capacity. Anybody who lived in the colony with more than a handful of pikmin of their own to care for—scientists, explorers, engineers—carried one of these. And now, ten fresh years into the colonization of PNF-404, that included just about everybody who lived and worked in the colony. The small onion was a relatively recent invention and a feat of total genius—something invented by the scientists of the very lab where Izzy worked, the very lab that owned these dorms.

Much like watermelons grown in square boxes, the synthetic onions were grown from synthetic “seeds” into smaller, more manageable shapes. This process caused them to lose their bloom-like propellers and stem-like legs, but they retained their clossy exterior and color-shifting properties, much to the surprise of the scientists who had engineered the devices. It seemed to be an evolutionary tactic of the pikmin themselves—some form of communication to their leaders and to other pikmin colonies. Or perhaps it was out of the kindness of their hearts.

Maybe her own white pikmin would be willing to swipe a bowl of breadbug mash for her from the cafeteria. Out of the kindness of their hearts. 

She sighed, clomping down the dorm hallway. The white pikmin was hot on her heels. Near the exit stairwell stood two vending machines. One was full of brightly-colored cans. The other was packed with of plastic-wrapped foods for all sorts—fruit, meat, even vegetables. There were jellyfloat cheese curds. Imitation dumple jerky. Dried sunseed berry bites. Pellet crisps. Izzy pulled her pockets inside out, fished around every pocket she had, and found nothing—less than nothing, if you included the hole in her back pocket. 

Her stomach growled. She missed the cafeteria, with its 24/7 menu full of hot food and its slightly-too-expensive entry fee. What she wouldn’t give to bite into a boiled mitite right now.

 _Think full thoughts_ , she thought, dragging herself back to her room. She just had to make it to tomorrow morning… as long as her project cleared the research board’s inspection. If it didn’t, it would be a skinny six months awaiting her. Luckily, that research project—and the money it entailed—was all but secured, thanks to her successful extraction of the musty-smelling green candypop bud currently in her lab garden.

Her holowatch buzzed. A text message from Foxe, a fellow zobotanist.

_Hey Izzy. Your candypop was doing fine earlier but… not looking so good right now. Lost three petals. Might want to check it out._

Izzy’s stomach dropped. She stumbled back to her dorm and pulled on her suit and helmet, grabbed her synthetic onion by its straps, scooped up the white pikmin still running after her, and rushed to her lab. 

* * *

“No, no, no, anything but this!” she wailed over the giant green flower. It was dying, there was no mistaking that, and her dreams of eating hot meals again were dying right along with it. Not to mention that Brittany was going to kill her. “We have to do something!”

Before she could bewail some more, the dying plant—which had held a handful of pikmin seeds incubating inside it—spat out two green pikmin seeds. Then, it gave a great shudder and collapsed with an audible thud. Dead. In contrast, the two green seeds sprouted from the ground with dark leaves. 

“Ah, well,” Fox said, in that ambivalent tone of his, “At least it’s not all for naught, ay?”

Izzy brushed this off and plucked the sprouts carefully. It put her face to face with two root-like green pikmin. They swayed in the nonexistant breeze mimicking swaying fauna, and looked up at her with huge white eyes. Their pale green skin was the same color as nectar weed. Formerly known as bulbmin, these parasitic pikmin—mimikmin, some called them—were fragile when outside of their host, but with the right beast host, they were all but immune to the hazards that killed most pikmin. Not to mention the damage they could do with a bulborb’s teeth or a wollywog’s girth. Even without a host, their peculiar powers of mimicry were unmatched. In their natural state, they looked like sprigs of grass. These two weren’t the first of their kind, but they were exceedingly rare. This was because there were no known green onions—these pikmin could only be born through candypop buds. 

Izzy’s research revolved around propagating as many of these green pikmin as possible. Their powers were endlessly versatile—you could imagine their ability to infect hosts of any kind as needed based on the task at hand. They could be used for ranching, for defense, for transportation—but there were precious few, and that was what Izzy’s research aimed to remedy. To say nothing of the failed experiments involving mimikmin that had succumb to their host’s wills and broken free from containment to eat other lab specimens… It wasn’t a perfect system yet. And Izzy needed more subjects to study. 

“Hello, lads,” she greeted, smoothing up their leaves. They instantly took to her, stretching up into her hand, imprinting as always on the one who plucked them. Her chest warmed. She was more than a little invested in their success, the little underdogs. 

Because she had been on the team to discover this bud—there was only one known location where they sprouted—and had been one of the ones to bring it back. She had, too, been the only one who could successfully make a pikmin seed of any other color sprout once planted in this flower. In a way, she was sort of their leader by proxy.

If only they could talk to her. She needed their instincts. She had so many questions about their candypops, their onions—they had such different biological makeup from other pikmin.

“A shame about the bud, though.” Foxe’s flat response drew her from her thoughts. The insomniac lab-mate scratched his arm. “Notoriously difficult. Otherwise, you know, there wouldn’t be so much money tied up in it.”

Izzy’s face fell. Right, there was that. Still hopeless. “If I could just find a way north of the Wistful Wilds…”

Foxe patted her shoulder uncertainly. “Maybe you can, um, salvage the oils from the petals. Great for petal growth.”

“Did I hear ‘Wistful Wilds’?”

Izzy spun around, proverbial hackles raised, to see someone at the door she neither wanted or expected to deal with right now. “Cooper,” she huffed out. 

The enormous man—tall, broad, and generous about the waist—gave a mocking smile. Behind him, a few of his red pikmin peeked around his legs, past the guts-stained apron he always wore. “Well, isn’t that convenient? I happen to have organized a small excursion to that very region.

“ _What?_ ”

“Oh, yes. Today, in fact.”

Izzy flexed her fingers hard at her sides. “What do you want?” She narrowed her eyes. “… Why are _you_ going?”

This seemed to catch him off guard. “I, uh, need some ingredients. That’s all.”

“You overcooked your stock again, didn’t you?”

“No, I… I need purple candypop oil.” 

“Purple candypop oil… isn’t that something Emi likes?” Izzy tapped her cheek in mock thought. 

The name made Cooper flush furiously. He looked like he was about to tell her to shut her trap, but then he changed his strategy. “Tell you what… I’ll let you come with me to the Wilds, and you’ll use your fancy science machinery to extract the candypop oil I need to… impress upon Emi. I get my ingredients, you get to harvest your green flower. Deal?”

Izzy hesitated. If she could make it to the Wilds and back, she could replace the green candypop bud and nobody would be the wiser. 

On the other hand, she’d owe Cooper. _Cooper._

“Remarkable how much money and _pride_ is on the line. But if you really want to turn down my generous offer...”

“Fine. Deal.” Izzy grimaced. “But nobody can know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Pikmin 3 Deluxe release! This series has been a favorite of mine for close to a decade, and this story is contains a few ideas—mind and others'—for a future series installment. 
> 
> To series newcomers as well as veterans—happy plucking!


	2. Part 2

They shook hands. The deal was sealed. 

“So…” Izzy’s frown deepened. “Who’s crazy enough to lead this expedition, anyway?”

* * *

Any explorer with a space suit and half a brain could lead an expedition. It was just that, in this case, they’d have to misplace their half and replace it with a whole lot of aggressively misplaced self-confidence. 

Escorting two civilians to the Wistful Wilds with just one navigator? Hilarious.

Not to mention ill-advised.

It was just four hours after their exchange that Izzy stood waiting in the cafeteria at the bottlecap bench near the drinking fountain—Cooper’s chosen meeting place. The smells alone were overwhelming. She hadn’t eaten since lunch the previous day (not counting half a can of energy drink for supper). Hunger pangs twisted her stomach like a burrowing snarrow in a washing machine. A small handful of white pikmin lounged about near, studying the other Hocotatians and Koppaites that walked by with childlike interest. They were too antsy to stay in their onion. Unlike her, they ignored the smells of wogburgers, poached bloyster gills, and mockiwi meatloaf in favor of the nectar feeders stationed at the opposite wall of the cafeteria. Honeywisps and dandelflies provided an endless supply of the stuff, having been among the first PNFian beasts captured and farmed colonists. It was a boon to keep their growing pikmin armies healthy. Ten years later, a steady diet of the viscous golden goop kept the colony’s pikmin sleek, well-groomed, and healthy, with big, full flowers bursting to bloom on their head-stalks. 

Tapping her foot impatiently, Izzy finally spied Cooper—and he was leaning halfway across a table on the other side of the cafeteria, well away from the rendezvous area, chatting up a girl who was sipping iced coffees with her pikmin. Izzy could just make out one girl—big, blue eyes and a handful of winged pikmin buzzing about over her head, sputtering their distaste at Cooper. It was Emi, of course, Cooper’s would-be main squeeze. Across the table, Emi’s friend Zettaro sat staring balefully over his teacup at Cooper’s overeager flirting. At his elbow, one of his pikmin—cyan—shared his haughty look.

Zettaro’s cyan pikmin were one of the more newly discovered varieties. Their light blue exterior was covered with fine fur, with luxuriously long fur around their necks and wrists. It made them look sort of like they were always wearing fur coats, which lent them a perennially hoity-toity look. As a bonus, their long fur helped them to sense shifting air currents and other oddities that other pikmin couldn’t. Their numbers dwindled around this time of year, but as the autumn nip intensified, astute scientists and shrewd explorers would breed them and populate their onions with the cyan pikmin. They would always be plentiful in the winter.

What finally tore her eyes away from these specimens was a glimpse of amber as an orange pikmin suddenly appeared as if from thin air at the foot of the table. It startled Cooper almost as much as the woman that appeared behind it—a woman with a steely stare and a shock of white-blond hair, almost as pale as the crystal mawdad armor fitted over her military-style suit and helmet. From the look of their conversation, she was short and very unhappy with Cooper. It was clear why when they both looked over and locked eyes with her. This, Izzy realized with a jolt, was their hired expedition leader.

Izzy couldn’t tear her eyes away from the synthetic onion on the Koppaite woman’s hip as she and Cooper swaggered towards the rendezvous point. The onion’s glossy surface shifted between orange hues and purple. Purple pikmin were afforded mostly to engineers and architects—those who could utilize the purples’ crazy strength. To see an explorer in possession of a purple squad was rare. They were powerful little berserkers in the right hands, but they were too destructive to be allowed into incapable hands. Still, what really caught Izzy’s eye were the amber swirls that punctuated that sea of purple. The orange pikmin that had been at the woman’s side moments before seemed to disappear as quickly as it had come.

The woman eyed Izzy as she approached. “I take it you’re the last minute tag-along.” It wasn’t a question, and wasn’t particularly mean-spirited. The woman didn’t bother pausing for an affirmation. Izzy wouldn’t have been surprised if this was the closest she got to conversation with any of her clients. Very short and to the point, she stood ramrod straight with her back to the room’s nearest exits. She checked her holowatch. “We’re ten minutes behind.”

“Nobody has orange pikmin in their onion around here,” Izzy blurted out. 

Cooper snickered when Izzy’s ears turned red at such an obvious tell. The woman blinked, then peered at her more closely. Then, to Izzy’s surprise, she readjusted her pack and held out her hand. “Hoppers.”

“Wha?”

“We call them hoppers in the field.”

“Oh!” Izzy snapped to attention and rushed to shake the woman’s hand. “I see. My name is— I’m Izzy. I’m a researcher.”

“Yes, I gather. Juliet.” The woman shook her hand once, very firmly. She glanced down. “Your pikmin are quite protective of you.”

Izzy looked down to see her white pikmin clustered around her legs, their tiny hands tugging the fabric of her suit as if to pull her out of danger. Izzy laughed awkwardly. _No danger here_ , she thought, _unless you count a dangerously embarrassing situation_. Quickly, she shooed her pikmin back into their onion, which was strapped to her lower back. The sea of white under the glossy surface almost overwhelmed the flecks of spring green that heralded the two mimikmin inside.

She had considered leaving her pikmin behind for such a dangerous mission, but ultimately decided against it. She kept white pikmin because they were such talented resource-gatherers. Their huge eyes were better than any scanner, and they were smart enough to know exactly what kinds of materials she needed. They had helped her find the first green candypop bud. 

“Listen carefully, because I will not tolerate any manner of tomfoolery on this expedition,” Juliet said. “We will not dawdle, we will not sightsee, and we will certainly not be in the Wilds after sunset. We will take the safest route to your intended destination and, secondarily, the most direct one. Within those parameters, gather all the materials you like for your research or for your recipes,” she added for Cooper. “Is that clear?”

“Crystal,” Izzy said.

At the same time, Cooper asked, “Don’t I get to make the rules since I’m paying you?”

“You paid me for safe passage there and back,” Juliet said flatly, her armored fingers twitching towards the onion on her belt. “That is what you will receive. Mark my words—the Wilds have swallowed people whole, entire _expeditions_ whole, and I’ll be damned if I see it happen on my watch again.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There would be no need for a real military force in this colony, as explorers like Juliet do most of the fighting and heading-off of beasts at the perimeter. 
> 
> However, these explorer-defenders have certainly recognized the use of certain types of pikmin for certain tasks outside of simple companions and laborers:
> 
> Red pikmin: Foot soldiers and wall-breaking siege units.  
> Yellow pikmin: Scouts and rogues who can dig traps.  
> Blue pikmin: Marine units and lifeguards; also, underwater recon.  
> White pikmin: Technicians and chemical warfare specialists.  
> Purple pikmin: Heavies and berserkers.   
> Rock pikmin: Artillery units.   
> Winged pikmin: Air units for mobility more than actual combat.   
> Cyan pikmin: Extrasensory radar units and snow/ice units.  
> Orange “hopper” pikmin: Trappers and assassins.  
> Green pikmin, or minikmin: spies and infiltrators.


End file.
